This map provides an overview of the trails in Guilford maintained by the Guilford Land Conservation Trust or by the Town of Guilford. See the GLCT website for links to trail maps of hiking trails in Guilford.
The map also organizes some information useful to the Westwoods Trails Committee including catalog of bridges, some points of interest, and outstanding issues on the trails. That information consists of geo-tagged photos that are stored in the Flickr photo web site.
The map is based on Open Street Maps, which is somewhat the equivalent of Wikipedia, but for mapping data.
The map works best on a full-sized screen, but it is usable from a phone. In the control area on the left there is a pop-up menu where you can pick the section of Guilford you want to focus on. If you click on the Re-focus button it will take you back to that section.
There are markers on the map about bridges, points of interest, and issues. If you click on a marker, it will display a small photo. If you click on the photo, it will take you to the full-sized photo displayed in an album in Flickr, a website for sharing photos.
Click on the Refresh Photos to get the latest photos from Flickr. This is only relevant if one is changing the Flickr photos after the map has been opened.
If you click on the Bookmark button, it will copy an elaborate URL to the clipboard that is designed to recreate the map you are currently viewing. You can go to an email message, for example, and paste in that URL so that to share with someone else.
On the right there is a box that controls what you see on the map. A set of radio buttons let you choose which base map to display. Most of these are from Open Street Map although the Satellite and USGS Topo maps come from other sources.
Next there is a series of check boxes that control what is displayed on top of the base map. The first box is for Waymarked Trails. In Open Street Maps there is a way to show how individuals sections of paths are connected together to form a trail. The Waymarked Trails layer displays those trail objects. See the Waymarked Trails website for more information.
There are also a series of check boxes that relate directly to the work of the Westwoods Trails Committee. The Bridges/Crossings displays how trails get across streams and wet spots. The Points of Interest markers show a variety of items such as location of information kiosks, some other signage, viewpoints, and odds and ends of other information. The Issues markers show where there are problems with the trails, such as a downed tree. Issues-CLOSED displays issues that have been resolved.
Note that the map is very similar to the Waymarked Trails hiking map is very similar to the map as it appears here. The main advantage of this map is that it displays some additional information via the geo-tagged photos.
If you zoom out a bit the map gives an overview of hiking routes in Connecticut via the Waymarked Trails layer. For example, you can see the route of the New England Trail (NET on the map) as it goes through the center of Guilford and zoom out so that you can see the full route of that national trail all the back to the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. When you zoom far out only national or regional trails are visible, but as you zoom in it will show local trails as well. You can quickly spot trail systems in our area of Connecticut. Note that this depends on whether trails have been recorded in Open Street Maps in a way that makes trails easy to identify. But the trail information is already fairly good and is improving.
The photo marker layers are aimed at the more narrow interests of the Westwoods Trail Committee. The information depends entirely on geo-coded photos in the Flickr photo site. It displays photos from three photo albums: Westwoods Bridges, Westwoods Points of Interest, and Westwoods Issues. In all three cases the name is too narrow. It’s more Guilford Conservation Land Trust more broadly rather than just Westwoods. If a geo-tagged photo is added to one of these photo albums, a marker is included on the map. Each time the maps is loaded it accesses Flickr to download info about all of the photos in these albums.
This web-based map is implemented using the R computer language and a tool called Shiny which creates R-based interactive web sites. The map is created by a java script tool called Leaflet.
This map site was created by me – John Goldin. I originally created a map site like this to display GPS traces and photos as souvenirs of my walking holidays. Later I realized that with a few tweaks I could re-purpose the same computer code to display information relevant to Westwoods. The original code for my walking souvenirs map is available at my github site. I also have a blog that has some other R stuff as well as some data topics, including Covid-19 stats for Connecticut.